Living the Dream

So I spent this past weekend in Gimmelwald and Interlaken, Switzerland and it was AMAZING. It was absolutely one of my top 3 trips ever out of this semester and my last semester here...maybe even my favorite ever. It was just so devastatingly beautiful and peaceful and perfect.

Thursday night Allie and I had dinner at Ai Cugnai (so much fun), then went to buy art (an adventure), and hung out a little before bed. We got up painfully early Friday and made a final stop at Bar da Gino before heading to Piazzale Roma (Allie) and the train station (me). It was really hard to say goodbye because I'd had such a good time with Allie and she did a great job of keeping my mind off things! Plus, the fact that she had so little time here and leaving was so sad made me really aware of how little time is left in my semester (about a month and a week). It's not like I'm trying to rush it away (quite the opposite, actually), but it is just FLYING by and I can't do a thing about it! I've had such a great time this semester and it's going to be even more difficult to leave this time because I know the chance for another experience like this is slim. Maybe I just won't come home this time... (kidding, Mom and Dad...well, maybe).

Anyways, I got to the train station in plenty of time and started the whole getting to Gimmelwald adventure. I took a train from Venice to Milan and edited my essays and applications (I suppose I'll never be entirely ready to send them off but it's definitely high time I do and I wanted to have one last glance over them). I caught my train in Milan with plenty of time and it headed towards Spiez, Switzerland. I meant to do more work but ended up sleeping almost the entire time (I blame the dramamine and extreme sleep deprivation)...I woke up just in time to see the suburbs of Milan turn in to the foothills of the alps. My train to Spiez was almost half an hour behind, so I missed my train from Spiez to Interlaken, but it's a short, frequent route, so I took a later one, landing me in Interlaken with 15 minutes to jog to the train station, buy a ticket to Gimmelwald, find an ATM, and get back to the platforms. Getting to Gimmelwald involved taking a train for about 20 minutes, a bus for about 12, and a cable car for 5. I made a whole bunch of friends on the train part of the trip and they were also on the same route, so we kind of joined up to figure it out together. They were hilarious...a whole huge group of Londoners who reminded me so much of the Casa Artom crew...made me miss them! It was a pretty uneventful trip despite the various forms of transportation and the fact that everything was in German (Interlaken and Gimmelwald are in the German part of Switzerland). It was beautiful, though...Gimmelwald is about an hour outside of Interlaken and almost directly north, so I got progressively further into the Alps on each form of transportation. I got off the cable car and our hostel was RIGHT there (so easy and convenient!)...I poked around a little bit and took a ton of pictures before I went in. Inside I realized reception wouldn't open for a few more hours (and the rest of the group was still en route), so I checked email and made some friends who were also hanging out in the hostel. The first group was about 20 people from Ohio and the second group was 3 kids who are a few years older than me and decided the current job market wasn't worth working in, so they're backpacking for about a month. One girl is from Mooresville (which is about 10 minutes from my house), which was cool, and the 3 of them ended up following us to Venice, so we're meeting up with them today. Anyways, the rest of the group arrived around dinnertime and made the best dinner ever (mostly because I was FAMISHED...I'd eaten nothing but a granola bar and some trail mix all day) and I crashed after a few card games.

We woke up around 8 on Saturday and had breakfast (gigantic chunks of yummy bread & some fruit) while selecting a trail to hike (with the help of the lady who runs the hostel). Instead of the original plan, we opted to do this really intense, 6ish hour hike that started and ended in Gimmelwald and involved hiking to the top of this little peak on top of a mountain. We started hiking around 9 and the path took us through what I believe passes for a town? (I say this not in a mean way, but only because it was a series of barns and pastures with goats and cows, but that's the most we saw for the entire hike) It was downhill for maybe 30 minutes (clearly too good to be true) and the lowest portion was this bridge over a river at the bottom of the valley. Then it was straight uphill. For approximately 3 or 4 hours. Over incredibly intense and constantly changing terrain. I say this as if it was a bad experience. It was quite the opposite. It was probably one of THE most rewarding things I have ever, ever, done. Superficially speaking, the weather was perfect, the pictures turned out well, and the company was so enjoyable. On a more serious note, it was a really intense hike that was very physically demanding, especially for someone not exactly in superior shape (at sea level, not to mention a few thousand feet up) and who has an irrational fear of heights/sliding down a rocky cliff side. But I stuck with it despite the fact that my lungs were screaming at me and my heart was thumping harder than ever before and I never took a break before our fearless leader (Eugene) announced one. I didn't even ever fall completely down (although I slipped and slid quite a few times...) or cry or freak out or complain (well, not more than a couple times). Eugene and Kayla are both really experienced hikers (and most everyone else is much more experienced than ME!), so they did a great job of helping me find places to put my feet (to avoid the sliding down the cliff scenarios) and making me feel like I wasn't going to die hiking. I couldn't make it all the way to the top of the extra peak thing (the path became more rock-climbing than path-esque and I was too scared), but I got almost all the way there and then just sat on a ledge and listened to the silence of the mountains punctuated by the occasional helicopter or airplane sounds while the rest of the group went to the top. The walk back down to the bridge was almost more intense than the straight uphill climb because it was so steep and slick that we had to go really slowly. Then once we got back to the river, it was all uphill back to the hostel (I was never so relieved to see UPHILL terrain). I wanted a nice, long, hot shower when we got back, but, the showers only took 1 Swiss Franc coins (1 CHF for 5 minutes of hot water was the deal) and I didn't have any, so we made an early dinner (and by dinner I mean feast) of roasted chicken, fried potatoes, pasta, and green beans. I finally got an amazing 15 minute shower (worth every last penny)and played cards until bed time.

Elizabeth and I got up at what we THOUGHT was 6:45 the next morning (we were planning to catch the 8am cable car to start the cable car-bus-train trip back to Interlaken). Well, Elizabeth remembered seeing signs in their hostel in Interlaken (from Thursday night) about daylight savings time, so we used the superslow hostel computer to google a few sites and figure out what time it ACTUALLY was. 5:45 AM, we discovered. We decided to stay up because neither of us had been sleeping well that night anyways, so we read, had breakfast, got the rest of the crew up, stripped and re-made our bunks, and headed off from the perfect, idyllic little town of Gimmelwald. We got to Interlaken at 9am and had breakfast at this place called Coop restaurant (Coop is a grocery store and this particular location was a Coop supercenter that involved a restaurant among other things). I got a cappuccino and THE best chocolate chocolate muffin ever (followed by some cereal because I was famished). Then we managed to fit ALL our backpacks in this little locker at the train station before heading off to explore the town for a few hours. We poked through a few souvenir shops, took a ton of pictures, and ended up back at Coop restaurant for lunch (everything else was too expensive...i.e. even the quickie burger place was over 8 Swiss Francs and sit-down restaurants were 20+ whereas I ate for 5 at the Coop). I also bought a baguette, an apple, and granola bar at the grocery for dinner on the trains home. We caught each of our trains with no incident, although our Spiez-Milan train had a mother and son on it and the son was NOT happy. He screamed and cried and squirmed almost the entire time and while we all knew the mom was doing her best, it put us on edge in a very real way and none of us were sad to get to Milan and go our separate ways. We all read/slept/listened to music for most of the trip, but towards the end, all 7 of us piled in to 1 compartment, shut all the drapes, turned off the lights, and told ghost stories (we were pretty slap happy after nearly a day of traveling on top of a superlong hike and some serious altitude changes). We were so happy to get back to Venice...Ana and I elected to skip the Pizza al Volo/Doge gelato stops and booked it home, where I proceeded to take a very long, very hot, very free shower, unpack, and finally get a good night's sleep!

Today I got coffee with Kayla, and have been hanging out working on my massive Thanksgiving to-do list while they have a marathon 2 hour Italian class, then it's off to Billa (yes, again), more time-killing while they have an afternoon class, our weekly house meeting (always an experiment in how long we can make 18 college kids sit still), the gym (if my muscles can handle it post-hike), dinner, and some very serious second break planning (since it's in, oh, 2ish weeks...). Eek. But, the girls and I decided to skip Vienna next weekend (to save money and not spent 15+ hrs on a train again) and go during 2nd break instead, which I think is a good decision because I haven't spent as much weekend time in Venice as I'd like to, PLUS, I really missed everyone this weekend and we don't have that much time left to live together as a little family!